Two Poems by Erin Lynn

SUNLIGHT IN WINTER

You stand in the bright lit roomand press your face against the glass.

Across the street is a cement factorythat grinds slaked lime, day and night.

It is day. The room is full of sunlightbut has none of its warmth because

it is January and you have moved from hometo live in a curtainless room, regarding

the grinding, bulblike machines in theirendless acts of production. In your hands:

nothing. And in your head is the steadysound of the crusher milling raw rock,

making a pulp of it, and your ownthoughts, addressed to no one.

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SHARING A BOWL ON A MONDAY IN JUNE

From one EAL to another

It’s summer and we are sweating throughthe afternoons without any coolantaside from the window and the weedwe smoke enough of to appreciatethe salt water pearling off our suntanned skin.

Sipping seltzer, you propose we sellour underwear—there’s a market, you say,people would pay a lot just for the smellof young women who like wearing lace.We wouldn’t even need to constructthe narrative—age, sex, location enoughfor fifty bucks and the pleasure of recycling.

The earth is heating at an increasing rateand you and I are either too brilliantor too slow to take regular jobs,ones that would blunt the edge of this rush,like we like it a little, this being hungry,playing with ways to sell our sexfrom a safe distance, invisible space.

Just blocks away, men move more moneyaround in seconds than we can imaginein our lives, weighing the land’s fatewith what they might secure against it:buildings so tall and thin they eclipsethe weather, and whether women like usdeserve to manage our futures.Is sex worth the risk of becoming mother too soon?

In Arkansas, a new law requires rape victimsto inform their rapists before an abortion.What portion of earth is there for thosewho wish to sit beneath a tree, mesmerizedby wind in leaves, unambitious of the spacethe sparrow takes up? You sayour generation shares everything becausewe have to, and this is our virtue.